shades of grey
by anankes
Summary: N, Touko, their love, and how he left her with a pair of useless wings. -poetry/vignettes, N/Touko


a/n: my meager first attempt at poetry. inspired by the work of /seacoast/, who mainly writes for HG but whatevs.

* * *

(shades of gray)

* * *

i. algorithms

You told me that the world was like a mathematical equation, and that people and Pokemon could be considered numbers

to be calculated

and

moved around

on a

_coordinate _|plane|

X / Y

but what do you get after plotting all those values?

is it a straight line

or messy dots?

how to you make a best-fit graph

when all the values

are scattered everywhere?

because _emotions_

aren't numbers you can manipulate

like 123 4 5 6

they're **complex **frac/tions

* * *

ii. ferris wheel

Do you remember that night? On the starry sky, in the Ferris wheel that turnedandturnedand_turned_, you told me who you were, and I accepted the fact that we were forever antagonists in an age-old story told by dragons of light and dark

old storytellers

pitting us against each other

on a chessboard with tiles of **black **and _white_

Do you remember that night? When we kissed

and it was hotter than Reshiram's fire

and more electric than Zekrom's lightning?

When you whispered

_sweet nothings _

into my ear and gave me promises of love and war?

then you slipped away into the night, your knights in tow

and the darkness consumed me, as I stood in that empty, neon amusment park with the flickering lights and cotton candy smells and burnt popcorn and happy laughter and thunder and pouring rain

and I stared as you faded away into a blur of gray

on an oil canvas where **black **and _white _weren't supposed to mix

those were your words, you recall

do you remember, though?

* * *

iii. climax

We dueled in a castle of thunder and ashes, born of the earth and inlaid with marble and gold and gilded with lies

We dueled, you and I, on the eternal chessboard

(fire and lightning)

You commanded the Yang Dragon; I, the Yin

(black and white)

And the air was charged with the smells of ozone and smoke, sharp and sooty, burning my throat and stinging my eyes as I searched for you in that haze

(oh, I was dark and you were blindingly bright)

and you shot streams of flame at me and my team; a storm of divine arrows falling from the sky

(oh, this love, it burns)

and they crashed into the ground and into my Pokemon, and a chorus of screams filled my ears while you flew above, unflinching, the sunlight lighting your hair and turning it into a golden halo

(my heart was as fragile as shards of glass)

and I screamed with them, a symphony of pain and desperation, as we shot bullets of blistering lightning and they struck your dragon with a thunderclap and you tumbled, smoke and feathers

(fall for me, my angel)

onto the ground

and

I

cried

because I had **won**

but I had also **lost**

* * *

iv. ever after

You fed me dreams, once. You told me you would give me a thousand suns and the moon and the stars, and I believed it all, naive girl that I was. You fed me numbers that confused my mind and strings of formulaic but empty love; you were following an algorithm

a/step/by/step/process

to winning my heart. So I guess, in the end, you were the victor, because you tore a hole in my chess and I was bleeding, but you never stopped to help me back up. You left me with an empty place

**as empty as the darkness**

from which I could never hope to fill.

Because my love for you was (is) like a coke addict's craving for the drug, or a smoker's hunger for nicotine, or a starving man for food, or the dead for life.

you gave me

_sun-speckled dreams and illusions  
(like your fox)  
and then  
with prestidigitation  
the trick was revealed  
but I, your assistant, lay dead in the cutting box stuck through with swords_

love

warm love

passion like the sun

a crown

and lovely white wings with which to fly

but then you took off, heading off for stretches of the world unknown

.: here be dragons :.

and you forgot

to teach me

**how to** _fly_

* * *

a/n: poetry isn't really my forte, so this might suck-okay, it might suck a lot. but please be gentle. :3


End file.
